St. Cloud Times athlete of the week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the St. Cloud Times athlete of the week is and who runs it

The St. Cloud Times athlete of the week lets readers honor a standout high school athlete in the St. Cloud, Minnesota area through a public vote that resets each week. The organizer is the St. Cloud Times, the daily newspaper whose masthead sits at sctimes.com, and the program lives inside the paper's high school sports coverage rather than as a standalone promotion. Each week the sports desk assembles a slate of nominees, publishes a ballot, and lets the audience decide who takes the honor.

The balloting itself is hosted on Crowdsignal, the polling platform that serves its ballots through the poll.fm domain. That hosting choice matters for supporters: the poll page is plain, fast to load, and works on a phone without any account, which is exactly what a newspaper audience needs when a window lasts only a few days. The current voting link is https://poll.fm/16481852, and it points to the newest ballot in the series.

The table below collects the core facts about the program in one place.

Because the program is a newspaper feature rather than a sponsored contest, it carries none of the entry fees, business categories or judging panels that reader's-choice ballots often have. The honor is decided entirely by the public vote, and the winner is then named in the Times' sports coverage, closing the loop between the poll and the paper.

The dated record: which seasons are confirmed and when the window falls

Two seasons of the program are confirmed: 2024 and 2025. That pair of edition years is what qualifies the athlete of the week as an annual program, and it matches how a newspaper feature actually behaves, returning with each high school sports year rather than running as a permanent fixture. The series is weekly inside each season, so a season is made up of many short ballots rather than a single long vote.

The most recent confirmed ballot is the poll covering Dec. 28, 2025 through Jan. 3, 2026, which is now marked closed on Crowdsignal. That ballot carried a slate of area high school athletes nominated for that week's honor, and its final tally remains viewable on the poll page even though voting has ended.

For the shape of a typical window, the newspaper's own words are the best guide. A sample ballot quoted by the Times instructed readers to vote from a Tuesday to noon on the Friday of that same week. That midweek-open, Friday-noon-close pattern gives a nominee's supporters roughly three days to rally, which is short by the standards of month-long community ballots and rewards early sharing.

The Times has not published which sports and season segments the ballot covers across the year, nor any published rule about repeat voting within a single week; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The start of the next season's ballots has likewise not been announced, so the newspaper's high school sports section is the place to watch for the new link.

How a supporter votes on the current ballot

Voting is deliberately simple. A supporter opens the poll link, reads the slate of nominees, selects a choice and submits. Crowdsignal registers the selection on the spot and the running tally updates on the same page, so the poll doubles as a live scoreboard for the week. No login, no email confirmation and no account of any kind sits between the supporter and the vote, which keeps friction low on a window that may last only a few days.

The practical sequence looks like this. Open https://poll.fm/16481852 or the newer link the Times has posted. Check whether the poll is open or closed; the Dec. 28, 2025 to Jan. 3, 2026 ballot is closed, so a fresh link is needed for the current week. Read the nominee descriptions, which identify each athlete by school and class. Select the radio button beside the chosen nominee and submit. If the window matches the Tuesday-to-Friday-noon pattern the newspaper has used, do it before Friday noon.

The poll page does not state whether repeat submissions are accepted, and the newspaper has published no rule capping a single supporter's submissions in a week. The ballot's own behavior is the only authority a supporter has, so treat the form's response as the rule for that week.

Supporters looking for broader tactics on short public polls can read our votes guide, and the questions around paid support are covered at is buying votes legal.

How this ballot sits beside its Minnesota neighbours

Minnesota has a crowded field of public-vote sports programs, and the St. Cloud Times athlete of the week is distinct in a specific way: it is the only one of the group run by a single city's daily newspaper and scoped to that paper's own coverage area. The statewide ballots cast a wider net, while this one follows the schools the St. Cloud Times actually covers week to week.

The nearest neighbours on this site are the Minnesota High School Football Player of the Week and the Minnesota Football Player of the Week, both of which follow the fall season, and the Minnesota High School Baseball Player of the Week and Minnesota High School Softball Player of the Week for the spring. The Minnesota Class 1A Football Player of the Year adds a season-long, class-based honor, and the Hobey Baker Award Fan Vote brings a college hockey fan vote to the same state page.

What separates the Times' program from all of them is cadence and scope. It runs weekly across the whole high school sports calendar rather than in a single sport's season, it is decided entirely by the public poll with no judging layer, and its result is published in the newspaper's own coverage. A vote cast here counts toward this honor alone; none of the statewide ballots share a tally with it, and each program's rules are its own.